What Columbia Film Lovers Want—and Expect—at the 2026 Oscars

The Oscars, as both an institution and a form of critique, have demonstrated something increasingly difficult to ignore: the power of good campaigning often outweighs the power of good critique. As a result, the average moviegoer, film connoisseur, and those in between have consistently found themselves out of step with the Academy.

This year feels no different.

Despite Sinners being the top pick among students for Best Picture in a survey of Columbia film lovers I conducted (followed at a relative distance by Marty Supreme), industry outlets like Variety predict a showdown between Sinners and One Battle After Another.

On paper, however, OBAA seems unbeatable. It has swept major precursor awards: the Golden Globes, the Critics’ Choice Awards, the National Board of Review, the Online Film Critics Society, the DGA, the Gotham Awards, and both the New York and London Film Critics Circles, to name a few. While Sinners and OBAA have had very different cultural impacts, OBAA has, through its campaign efforts, dominated much of the 2026 awards circuit in terms of production and direction.

That dominance is not necessarily undeserved. And Sinners is not by any means the “underdog” people set it out to be. If anything, its popularity among audiences complicates what “mainstream” even means in an awards season still largely driven by institutional taste. As of now, Sinners is probably on its sixth release in theaters and remains an audience favorite among Columbia students and across social media.

But the never-ending list of OBAA wins represents something specific: prestige consolidation. Critical bodies validating one another until momentum starts to look like inevitability—the exact kind of campaigning-over-critique dynamic that has come to define modern awards seasons. That consolidation, however, has not translated to Columbians.

To explore that divide more directly, I asked Columbia film lovers two questions across the major Oscar categories: who they wanted to win, and who they thought would win. The most revealing part of the results was not the names themselves, but the split between expectation and desire.

In the Best Picture category, Sinners dominates the “Who do you WANT to win?” column, while OBAA dominates the “Who do you THINK will win?” column. Students describe Sinners as culturally resonant among 20-somethings and within the Black community—a film that felt alive in conversation. And yet, many assume the Academy will not side with that energy. They root for Coogler, Jordan, and the rest of the Sinners community regardless, even as they predict a different outcome.

In other words, students distinguish admiration from expectation. And they seem to agree that the Oscars, much like the rest of the awards system, do not necessarily reward the film that felt most alive in the cultural conversation, but the film most securely positioned within institutional approval—even when that film inspires more debate than consensus. I guess those are the problems that arise with a term as ambiguous as “Best Picture.”

Beyond Best Picture, the pattern continues in the acting categories.

In the Leading Actor category, 57% of students want Michael B. Jordan to win, while 36% root for Timothée Chalamet. But when asked who they think will win, 57% predict Chalamet, and only 14% predict Jordan. Students remain loyal to Sinners, even as they predict the Academy will not return that loyalty.

The pattern is less consistent in Leading Actress, where 79% predict Jessie Buckley will win for Hamnet—likely reflecting her recent awards streak, despite only about half of respondents having actually seen the film.

The Supporting Actor category is more aligned: most want Sean Penn to win and believe he will, though a small margin predicts Stellan Skarsgård for his performance in Sentimental Value. In Supporting Actress, while 36% want Wunmi to win for Sinners, 64% predict Teyana Taylor will bring OBAA another victory.

At the end of the survey, I also asked respondents to leave comments and indicate how many of the 2026 Oscar nominees they had actually seen. The responses ranged widely—from near completionists to those operating largely on trailers, discourse, and awards buzz. And yet, even with varying levels of exposure, the WANT versus THINK divide remained strikingly consistent.

And so we circle back to the central divide—Sinners versus OBAA for Best Director.

OBAA represents an auteur-backed, critically consecrated, awards-sweeping film that fits squarely within the Academy’s traditional validation structures. Not to say it lacks cultural impact, but it operates differently than the generationally championed energy that surrounds Sinners.

The broader implication of this survey, therefore, is not that students are inherently divided, but that a divide emerges when asked to distinguish between desire and prediction. Young filmgoers at Columbia clearly differentiate what they want from what they expect the Academy to choose.

The Academy may still pick the winner. But cultural loyalty, at least among this micro-electorate, lives elsewhere.

And perhaps that is the real story this year—not simply who takes home the award, but who we believe it was built to reward. As much as we like to say the awards don’t matter, it’s still the Oscars.

Morgen is a first year Film and Media and Creative Writing Student. She likes writing, the movie Rio, and drinking ginger ale.

@morgen.thompson